Isaiah

Sixty-six chapters that begin with a courtroom summons to heaven and earth and end with new heavens and a new earth. Isaiah's ministry runs through four kings and the arrival of Assyria, and its opening argument is simple and unwelcome: the sacrifices are impeccable and the hands offering them are full of blood, so the worship is refused. What God asks for instead is stated in six imperatives — cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, relieve the oppressed, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. The first half of the book presses that against a nation that keeps choosing alliances over trust: a vineyard that produced sour grapes, a king offered a sign and refusing it, an empire told it is an axe that has started congratulating itself on the woodcutting. Then, from chapter 40, the tone changes completely and does not change back. Comfort my people. A voice crying in the wilderness. Every valley raised, every mountain lowered. Idol-makers described in detail, sawing a log in half and burning one end to bake bread and bowing to the other. A pagan emperor called by name and called God's anointed. And four passages about a servant — chosen, taught, beaten, silent, pierced — whose identity readers have argued over for two thousand years. The book ends with a city where nobody plants for someone else to eat, and with a last verse most people would rather it did not have.

Themes

• The Holy One of Israel — The book's own title for God, used twenty-five times here and barely anywhere else — holiness experienced first as terror in chapter 6 and then as the reason for rescue in chapter 43.
• Bring no more vain offerings — The opening charge is not that the worship is sloppy but that it is unwanted, because of what the worshippers' hands have been doing. Justice is the recurring demand, not merely orthodoxy.
• If you will not believe, you will not be established — Ahaz is the case study: offered any sign he likes and refusing it, because he has already sent for Assyria. Trust versus alliances is the political argument of the first half.
• A remnant will return — Isaiah names a son Shear-Jashub — 'a remnant returns' — and the phrase cuts both ways: only a remnant, and yet a remnant. The stump keeps its holy seed.
• Comfort, comfort my people — Chapter 40 turns the whole book, and the reasoning changes with the tone: the argument is now that a God who measures the sea in his palm and names the stars can be relied on by people who feel forgotten.
• Your gods are carried; my God carries you — The idol satires are the sharpest polemic in Scripture — a man sawing a log, burning half and worshipping the rest — set against a God who has carried Israel since before it was born.
• Behold my servant — Four passages, from a servant who will not break a bruised reed to one despised and rejected and numbered with transgressors. Who he is has been debated since before the New Testament, and the book itself never settles it.

Outline

• 1. Come now, let us reason together — A courtroom summons, worship refused because of what the hands have done, and six imperatives that say what would be accepted instead.
• 2. They shall beat their swords into plowshares — A mountain every nation walks up to, and then a day when the proud hide in caves and throw their idols to the bats.
• 3. The plunder of the poor is in your houses — Leadership stripped out of a city until children rule it, and a courtroom scene where the elders are asked why they grind the faces of the poor.
• 4. A canopy over all the glory — Seven women to one man, a branch that is beautiful, and a cloud by day and fire by night stretched over Zion like a wedding canopy.
• 5. He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed — A love song about a vineyard that turns into a verdict, and six woes on the people who bought up all the land and called evil good.
• 6. Whom shall I send? — A throne, six-winged creatures, a coal from the altar, and a commission whose stated purpose is that nobody will listen.
• 7. The virgin will conceive — A terrified king met at a water conduit, offered any sign he wants, refusing it — and given one anyway.
• 8. Bind up the testimony — A child named 'quick to plunder', a gentle stream refused for a river that will reach the neck, and instructions not to call everything a conspiracy.
• 9. For a child is born to us — Light on the road by the sea, four throne names, and then a refrain about a hand still stretched out that will not stop repeating.
• 10. Shall the axe boast against him who chops with it? — An empire told it is a tool, and a march route named town by town until the army is close enough to shake its fist at the city.
• 11. A shoot out of the stock of Jesse — A green shoot from a cut stump, a judge who does not go by appearances, and a world where nothing hurts or destroys.
• 12. You will draw water from the wells of salvation — Six verses of song closing the first movement, sung by people who have come through the anger.
• 13. The day of Yahweh comes — The first oracle against the nations: Babylon, three centuries before it mattered, and stars that give no light.
• 14. How you have fallen from heaven — A taunt-song sung over a dead king's grave, and one of the most argued-over passages in the Bible.
• 15. My heart cries out for Moab — An oracle that weeps for the nation it condemns — the prophet's own grief written into the judgement.
• 16. Send the lambs to the ruler of the land — Refugees at the fords asking for shelter, a throne promised in loving kindness, and a three-year deadline.
• 17. In the evening, sudden terror — Damascus and Ephraim together, gleanings left on the topmost bough, and nations roaring like the sea until they are chased away like chaff.
• 18. A land of whirring wings — Messengers sent back to a distant people, and a harvest cut before it ripens.
• 19. Blessed be Egypt my people — An oracle against Egypt that ends with an altar in Egypt, a highway to Assyria, and Israel as a third with both of them.
• 20. Naked and barefoot for three years — The shortest and most uncomfortable sign-act in the book, and its stated target is an alliance.
• 21. Watchman, what of the night? — A vision that makes the prophet physically ill, and a sentinel posted to report what he sees.
• 22. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die — A city on its rooftops celebrating a siege it should be mourning, and a palace official replaced for cutting his own tomb.
• 23. Wail, ships of Tarshish — The great trading city of the world addressed as a merchant, with its profit eventually consecrated.
• 24. The earth is utterly broken — The oracles widen from nations to the world itself, and the picture is a land emptied and a broken covenant.
• 25. He will swallow up death forever — A feast of rich food on the mountain for all peoples, a veil removed, and tears wiped from every face.
• 26. You keep him in perfect peace — A song for a strong city, trust described as a steady mind, and a line about the dead rising that readers weigh carefully.
• 27. In that day, sing to her — Leviathan dealt with, and the vineyard of chapter 5 replanted — this time with someone watching it night and day.
• 28. Precept upon precept, line upon line — Drunk priests mocking the prophet's speech as baby talk, a covenant made with death, and a farmer who does not plough forever.
• 29. This people draw near me with their mouth — A city besieged and dreaming, a sealed book nobody can read, and worship learned by rote.
• 30. In returning and rest you will be saved — A treaty with Egypt described as shelter in a shadow that will shame them, and a teacher who will not hide himself any more.
• 31. The Egyptians are men, and not God — Horses and chariots weighed against one sentence, and a lion that is not frightened off by shouting.
• 32. A man shall be as a hiding place from the wind — Rulers who shelter rather than exploit, complacent women told to shudder, and a spirit poured out that turns wasteland into orchard.
• 33. Your eyes will see the king in his beauty — A destroyer who will himself be destroyed, and a question about who can live with a consuming fire.
• 34. The sword of Yahweh is filled with blood — The harshest chapter in the book — a day of vengeance over Edom, and a land given to owls and jackals.
• 35. The desert shall rejoice and blossom like a rose — The answer to chapter 34, laid straight beside it: water in the wilderness, a highway called holy, and everlasting joy on their heads.
• 36. On what do you trust? — An Assyrian officer at the wall of Jerusalem, arguing in Hebrew so the men on it can hear him.
• 37. He spread it before Yahweh — A letter carried into the temple and laid open, an oracle in verse, and a camp emptied in a night.
• 38. I will add fifteen years to your life — A death sentence reversed, a shadow that goes backwards, and a psalm written by a man who thought he was finished.
• 39. There will be peace in my days — Envoys from Babylon shown everything, and an oracle that names the exile a century before it happens.
• 40. Comfort, comfort my people — The book turns. A voice in the wilderness, grass that withers, a shepherd carrying lambs, and a God who measures the sea in the hollow of his hand.
• 41. You are my servant; I have chosen you — A courtroom for the nations and their gods, a challenge to predict anything at all, and a worm told not to be afraid.
• 42. He will not break a bruised reed — The first servant song, and a servant who does not shout in the street or put out a smouldering wick.
• 43. I have called you by your name — Water and fire that do not overwhelm, a people declared precious, and a new thing already springing up.
• 44. He bakes bread on its coals, and makes a god of the rest — The idol satire at full length — a man sawing a log in half — and a pagan king named as a shepherd.
• 45. Cyrus, whom I have held by his right hand — A foreign emperor called God's anointed, and an argument that the one who made light also makes calamity.
• 46. Even to old age I am he — Babylon's gods loaded on pack animals, and a God who has carried Israel since the womb.
• 47. Sit in the dust, virgin daughter of Babylon — An empire addressed as a pampered queen put to work at a millstone, with its astrologers invited to save it.
• 48. I have refined you, but not as silver — Old predictions cited as proof, new ones announced before they happen, and an exit from Babylon that must not be quiet.
• 49. A light to the nations — The second servant song, and an answer to a people who say they have been forgotten — a mother might forget, and even then.
• 50. I gave my back to those who beat me — The third servant song: a taught tongue, an ear opened morning by morning, and a face set like flint.
• 51. Look to the rock from which you were cut — Abraham and Sarah recalled as evidence, and a cup of staggering taken out of Jerusalem's hand.
• 52. How beautiful on the mountains are the feet — A herald arriving with news, an exit that is not a flight, and the opening lines of the fourth song.
• 53. Despised and rejected by men — The most disputed chapter in the Old Testament: a servant who bears what was ours, is silent under it, and is buried with the rich.
• 54. Sing, barren woman — A childless woman told to enlarge her tent, and a covenant of peace compared to Noah's promise about the waters.
• 55. Come, everyone who thirsts — Free food for people with no money, thoughts higher than thoughts, and rain that does not return empty.
• 56. A house of prayer for all peoples — Foreigners and eunuchs given a name better than sons and daughters — and watchmen who are blind dogs that cannot bark.
• 57. I dwell with him who is of a contrite spirit — Idolatry described as adultery, and the high and lofty one who lives with the crushed.
• 58. Is this not the fast that I have chosen? — Fasting that changes nothing answered with a definition: loose the bonds, share your bread, and don't hide from your own family.
• 59. Your iniquities have separated you — Hands stained, webs that make no clothing, and justice standing far off in the public square.
• 60. Arise, shine, for your light has come — Camels, ships and foreign kings converging on a city that needs no sun or moon.
• 61. The Spirit of the Lord is on me — Good news to the poor, liberty to captives, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of heaviness.
• 62. You will be called Hephzibah — New names for a city that was called Forsaken, and watchmen told to give God no rest until it happens.
• 63. Who is this who comes from Edom? — A figure returning alone from a winepress in stained clothes, and then a prayer that turns to remembering and pleading.
• 64. We all are like an unclean thing — The prayer at full stretch: tear the heavens open, come down — and we are the clay and you are the potter.
• 65. New heavens and a new earth — An answer that divides the people in two, and a world where nobody builds a house for someone else to live in.
• 66. As one whom his mother comforts — Heaven as a throne and earth as a footstool, a nation born in a day, and a last verse the book will not soften.

Chapters

• Isaiah 1 — A courtroom is convened with heaven and earth as witnesses, and the charge is not that the worship is inadequate but that it is unwanted — the festivals are impeccable and the hands lifted in prayer are covered in blood.
• Isaiah 2 — Two futures in one chapter, and they are put side by side without transition: all nations walking uphill to learn a way of settling disputes without weapons, and all human height brought down until people are hiding in caves and throwing their gold idols to the bats.
• Isaiah 3 — Judgement described as the removal of competent people. Take away the supplies and the soldier, the judge, the prophet, the elder and the skilled craftsman, and what is left is boys in charge and a society where nobody will accept a job because the storehouse is empty.
• Isaiah 4 — Six verses that turn, and the turn is architectural: over everything left in Zion, a cloud by day and a flaming fire by night — and over all of it, a canopy. The word is the one used for a wedding tent.
• Isaiah 5 — A love song about a vineyard that turns into a verdict halfway through, and the audience convicts itself before it realises what it is listening to. Then six woes, and the last of them is about calling evil good.
• Isaiah 6 — The most famous call narrative in Scripture, and the commission it ends in is the strangest: go and tell this people to keep listening without understanding, and make their hearts dull — a message whose stated purpose is that it will not be received.
• Isaiah 7 — A king is met at a water channel with his son beside him, told the two kings terrifying him are burnt-out torch stubs, offered any sign he wants in heaven or hell, and refuses it in the most pious language available — because he has already made his decision.
• Isaiah 8 — A child's name written on a public placard before he is conceived, a gentle stream refused in favour of a river that will reach the neck, and an instruction not to join in when everybody starts calling everything a conspiracy.
• Isaiah 9 — Out of the darkness the previous chapter ended in, a light on the least likely road — the northern territory Assyria took first — and a child with four throne names. And then the refrain returns, four more times, and nothing improves.
• Isaiah 10 — The empire is told what it is. Assyria is an axe in someone else's hand and does not know it, and the moment it starts congratulating itself on the woodcutting is the moment it becomes the next thing to be cut down.
• Isaiah 11 — The forest has just been felled, and the next word is about a stump. A green shoot out of the stock of Jesse, a judge who does not decide by what he sees or hears, and a world where the predator and the prey lie down together because the whole earth is full of the knowledge of God.
• Isaiah 12 — Six verses of song to close the first movement, and the first line is the strangest: I will thank you, Yahweh, because you were angry with me. The anger is included in what is being thanked for, not skipped over.
• Isaiah 13 — The first oracle names Babylon, which in Isaiah's lifetime was a subject province of Assyria and no threat to anyone — and describes its fall in the vocabulary of the day of Yahweh, with the stars going out.
• Isaiah 14 — A funeral song sung over a tyrant, and the poem's method is mockery by hospitality: the dead kings of the earth get up off their thrones in the underworld to welcome him and ask whether he has become as weak as they are.
• Isaiah 15 — An oracle against an enemy that spends most of its length weeping. Moab is condemned and the prophet's own heart cries out for it — the judgement and the grief are in the same poem, and neither cancels the other.
• Isaiah 16 — Moabite refugees at a river crossing are compared to birds pushed out of a nest, and the oracle turns into an appeal for asylum: give counsel, make your shade like night at noon, hide the outcasts, and don't betray the fugitive.
• Isaiah 17 — Damascus and Israel are addressed together, because they made an alliance together — and the picture of what will be left is agricultural: the two or three olives on the topmost branch that the harvesters could not reach.
• Isaiah 18 — Ambassadors arrive by papyrus boat from a distant land and are sent home with a message: God is watching quietly, like heat shimmering in sunshine, and will prune the vineyard just before the harvest.
• Isaiah 19 — An oracle against Egypt that starts with the Nile drying up and ends with an altar to Yahweh inside Egypt, a highway to Assyria, and the two superpowers blessed by name alongside Israel.
• Isaiah 20 — The most uncomfortable sign-act in the book: three years of walking stripped and barefoot through Jerusalem, and its target is a foreign policy — the alliance with Egypt and Cush that the previous chapters have been arguing against.
• Isaiah 21 — A vision that makes the prophet physically ill, a lookout posted to watch a road, and the report he finally shouts down: Babylon has fallen, and all the images of her gods are shattered on the ground.
• Isaiah 22 — The oracle sequence turns on Jerusalem, and the charge is a mood: a city on its rooftops celebrating survival, checking its armoury, counting its houses and repairing its walls — and never once looking at the one who made the situation.
• Isaiah 23 — The last oracle takes the world's greatest trading city and addresses it as a business: the sea itself disowns her, her market is closed, and after seventy years her profits are turned into supplies for people who need feeding.
• Isaiah 24 — The oracles stop naming countries and address the earth itself. A land emptied so evenly that priest and layman, buyer and seller, creditor and debtor all end up in the same condition — because an everlasting covenant has been broken.
• Isaiah 25 — The answer to the emptied earth is a dinner. On the same mountain, a banquet of rich food and aged wine for all peoples, a shroud pulled off every face, death swallowed up, and tears wiped away by hand.
• Isaiah 26 — A song for a city whose walls are salvation, and its most famous line is about a state of mind: you keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you. And near the end, a verse about the dead rising that sits oddly with the verse before it.
• Isaiah 27 — The vineyard of chapter 5 is replanted, and every detail is reversed: instead of a hedge removed and no rain, a keeper who waters it every moment and guards it night and day, and an offer of peace made twice to the thorns.
• Isaiah 28 — Drunk priests mock the prophet's preaching as baby talk — precept upon precept, line upon line — and are told they will get exactly that, in a foreign accent. Then the chapter answers them with a stone laid in Zion and a farmer who knows when to stop ploughing.
• Isaiah 29 — A city under siege that speaks out of the dust like a ghost, a nation whose vision has become a sealed book nobody can open, and the charge that lands hardest: this people honour me with their lips while their hearts are far away.
• Isaiah 30 — The Egyptian alliance argued against at full length: a caravan of tribute crossing a desert full of snakes to buy help from a country nicknamed Do-Nothing — and one sentence offered instead, which the chapter records being refused.
• Isaiah 31 — Nine verses that put the whole argument in one sentence: the Egyptians are men and not God, and their horses are flesh and not spirit. And then a lion that does not look up when the shepherds start shouting.
• Isaiah 32 — Leadership described by what it shelters: a man like a hiding place from the wind, a stream in a dry place, the shade of a great rock in a weary land. And then a warning to women who are comfortable, and a spirit poured out that turns wasteland into orchard.
• Isaiah 33 — A destroyer who has never been destroyed is told his turn is coming, and then the chapter asks the question the whole book has been circling: who among us can live with a consuming fire? The answer is a list of behaviours, not a creed.
• Isaiah 34 — The harshest chapter in the book. The sky rolled up like a scroll, a sword described as drinking, a land turned to burning pitch, and a survey team measuring a ruin with the line of confusion and the plumb line of emptiness.
• Isaiah 35 — The answer to the previous chapter, laid straight beside it. Where Edom got pitch and thorns and jackals, the desert here gets water, crocus flowers and a road — and the jackals' lair becomes a marsh with reeds in it.
• Isaiah 36 — The argument stops being poetry. An Assyrian officer stands at the same water conduit where Isaiah met Ahaz in chapter 7, and makes the case against trusting God — in Hebrew, deliberately, so the men on the wall can hear every word.
• Isaiah 37 — The letter is taken into the temple and spread out, the answer comes back as a taunt-song in verse, and the siege ends without a battle — the sword not of man that chapter 31 promised.
• Isaiah 38 — A death sentence reversed, a shadow that goes ten steps backwards as the confirming sign — and, uniquely to Isaiah's version, the psalm the king wrote afterwards about what it was like to think he was finished.
• Isaiah 39 — Envoys arrive from Babylon with a get-well present, are shown the entire treasury, and the prophet's questions are those of an investigator. The reply names the exile a century early — and the king's answer is the most uncomfortable sentence in the book.
• Isaiah 40 — The turn. A command to comfort, a voice ordering roadworks in the desert, grass that withers under a hot wind, a shepherd carrying lambs in his arms — and a God who has measured the oceans in the hollow of his hand and still bothers to notice that one people feels overlooked.
• Isaiah 41 — A courtroom is convened for the nations and their gods, and the challenge put to the defence is evidential: tell us what is going to happen, or tell us what already did and how it turned out. Do anything at all, good or bad, so that we can see you are there.
• Isaiah 42 — The first servant passage, and everything in it is defined by restraint: he will not shout, he will not raise his voice in the street, he will not break a reed that is already bent, and he will not put out a wick that is barely burning.
• Isaiah 43 — The answer to a people who have just been told they were on fire and didn't notice: you are mine, I have called you by name, and when you pass through the water and the fire, they will not close over you.
• Isaiah 44 — The idol satire at full length: one log, cut down and split — half of it roasts the dinner and warms the man, and he bows down to the other half and asks it to save him. And then a Persian king is named a century before he was born.
• Isaiah 45 — A foreign emperor is taken by the right hand and called God's anointed, and the reason given is not that he deserves it but that he does not even know who is doing it — so that everyone from east to west will know there is nobody else.
• Isaiah 46 — Two ways of moving a god through a city. Babylon's are loaded onto pack animals and become a burden to the exhausted beasts carrying them; Israel's has been carrying his people since before they were born and says he will still be doing it when they are old.
• Isaiah 47 — An empire addressed as a pampered woman ordered down to sit in the dust and work a millstone. The charge is not conquest — it is that she showed no mercy to the people handed over to her, and thought her position was permanent.
• Isaiah 48 — The most impatient chapter in the section. Old predictions are cited as evidence, new ones are announced before they happen so nobody can credit an idol, and the audience is told plainly why: because I knew you are obstinate, and your neck is an iron sinew.
• Isaiah 49 — The second servant passage, and it contains a complaint: I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing. The answer enlarges the job rather than reducing it — restoring Israel is too small a thing; you will be a light to the nations.
• Isaiah 50 — The third servant passage, and it is the first one to describe injury: a back given to those who beat it, cheeks to those who pulled out the beard, and a face not hidden from spitting — by someone who says he was not rebellious and did not turn back.
• Isaiah 51 — Three times the chapter says listen, and three times it says awake — and the evidence it offers to people who feel too few to matter is that the family started with two people and one of them was past childbearing.
• Isaiah 52 — A herald appears on the hills with news, and the exit from Babylon is ordered to be nothing like the exit from Egypt: not in haste, not by flight — because this time somebody is going in front and somebody is bringing up the rear.
• Isaiah 53 — Twelve verses in the first person plural. We hid our faces from him, we esteemed him not, we considered him struck by God — and then the sentence that turns it: he was pierced for our transgressions, and by his wounds we are healed.
• Isaiah 54 — Immediately after the servant chapter, a childless woman is told to sing and to buy more tent fabric — because she is going to need the space. And the covenant that follows is compared to a promise God made about weather.
• Isaiah 55 — The invitation that closes the section, and the terms are impossible: come and buy, everyone who has no money. Then a question about why anyone spends money on what is not bread — and rain that does not go back up until it has done something.
• Isaiah 56 — Two categories of person the law explicitly excluded — foreigners and eunuchs — are named and let in, and the eunuch is promised a name in the temple better than sons and daughters. And then the leadership is described as guard dogs that cannot bark.
• Isaiah 57 — The most exhausted verse in the book — you were wearied by the length of your way, yet you did not say, it is hopeless — and the most surprising address: the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity says he lives in two places, and the second is with the crushed.
• Isaiah 58 — A congregation asks why its fasting produces no results, and gets an answer with a definition attached: the fast God chose is loosing the bonds of wickedness, sharing your bread, housing the homeless poor, clothing the naked — and not hiding from your own relatives.
• Isaiah 59 — The hand is not too short and the ear is not deaf — the problem is on the other side. And when the survey finds nobody willing to intervene, the one making the survey puts on armour and does it himself.
• Isaiah 60 — A city told to get up because the light has already arrived, and then a long shot of everything converging on it — camels from Midian, ships from Tarshish, flocks from Kedar, timber from Lebanon — through gates that are never shut.
• Isaiah 61 — An anointed speaker announces a programme of releases, and every item on it is a reversal of a specific loss — a headdress instead of ashes, oil of joy instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of a spirit of heaviness.
• Isaiah 62 — A city gets new names — she was called Forsaken and Desolate, and will be called My Delight Is In Her and Married — and the watchmen on her walls are given a job description that consists of not letting God rest until it happens.
• Isaiah 63 — A figure comes up the road from Edom in stained clothes and is asked why, and the answer is a winepress he worked alone. Then the chapter turns and becomes a prayer that runs unbroken to the end of the next one.
• Isaiah 64 — The prayer at full stretch: tear the sky open and come down. And its lowest point is an admission most religious texts avoid — that even the good things they have done are unpresentable.
• Isaiah 65 — The answer to the prayer, and it divides the audience in two: my servants will eat, but you will be hungry. And then new heavens and a new earth, described almost entirely in terms of ordinary work that finally belongs to the person who did it.
• Isaiah 66 — The book ends where it began — with worship and what God actually looks at — and refuses to close comfortably. Heaven is a throne and the earth a footstool, a nation is born in a day, a mother comforts her child, and the last verse is about corpses.

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